[MCX Newsletters] MCX and MMC v2017.7 and meet the new MCX Studio

[Qianqian Fang]

Dear MCX and MMC registered users,

I am excited to let you know our most recent releases of MCX and MMC, v2017.7
are now available for download at our website http://mcx.space

as a registered user, you may skip the registration and directly access the new
packages at

https://sourceforge.net/projects/mcx/files/

The biggest update in this release is the significantly improved GUI - MCX Studio.
This new version (v0.9) MCX Studio became a unified user interface to
MCX, MMC and MCXCL. Using this program, you can easily access all program
options, design media properties and source/detector settings, as well as design
the media volume data using our shape editor. The MCX studio also has countless
improvement in features, robustness and art-work. Please see the new screen
captures here

http://mcx.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?Doc/MCXStudio

You can find the mcxstudio executable inside all MCX binary releases, along side with
the mcx executable under the mcx/bin folder. If you put mmc executable under the
same folder, you may also create simulations for MMC using this GUI.

Aside from the new GUI, there were many bug fixes and improvements for
MCX and MMC as well. Please check out our ChangeLogs for details

https://github.com/fangq/mcx/blob/master/ChangeLog.txt#L3-L23
https://github.com/fangq/mmc/blob/master/mmc/trunk/ChangeLog.txt#L3-L15

specifically, a few new options were added for mcx:

- a new source form "pencilarray" was added
- progress bar (-D P) on windows was fixed; Pascal cards are also supported on windows
- use --gscatter option to reduce simulation time for high g medium

for mmc:

- use the --atomic 0 option to disable atomic operations to gain linear speed-up
   for CPUs with many cores (Xeon)
- add --debugphoton option to print debug info only for a specific photon ID
- also supports --gscatter option for faster simulations
- the "static TLC error" on matlab (it is a matlab bug) has a workaround

Please go ahead and download the new packages and let me know if there is any issue.

Particularly, I strong encourage all of you to try out our new MCX Studio GUI. You can
load the pre-built mcx_demos.mcxp fie under the mcx/example folder to test each
example. I will create a screencast in the next few weeks to show how to use this
tool. In the next email, I will announce a FREE training workshop in August, in this event, we
will give more detailed demos and user hands-on training on using these tools.

stay tuned.

Qianqian